“I lay floating in a hot salt water bath, head back and salty tears falling into the water. The crushing pain in my head is exhausting. I’m begging God to let me live.

“My hearing is fading. My eyesight is fading. My body functions are fading. My memory is fading. I feel like I am disappearing. This is the tenth night of the disappearing act.

“Ten days ago I had thought I had a handle on this invisible force. I really thought I’d been so careful. Yet, there in the meeting room I again felt a searing pain in my head. The crushing in my temples increased over the next two days.”

Fortunately Lynn Attwood, 55, is now one of the luckier ones. She researched the nose bleeds, the crushing headaches, nausea and dizziness and found ES-UK, a charity established to help people with electrical sensitivity (ES).

Anyone can develop the condition, including children. Surveys suggest 30% of people are slightly allergic to electromagnetic frequencies, usually without knowing it, 3% moderately, and under 1% severely. Numbers for long-term effects are not yet known. Nor is it known whether today’s ES sufferers are the canaries at the sharp end of the affect which could in future be detrimental to most of the population’s health.

ES is caused by being exposed to electromagnetic radiation. It has been known as an illness since the Russians used it against an American Embassy in the Cold War. The Russians now protect their population from it. This illness was then documented in industries such as radio and telecommunications when workers were irradiated, then later in cases where there had been badly installed electrical wiring and electrical appliances.

More recently the incidence of the condition has proliferated as we have been exposed to 1000 times the level of electromagnetic fields than we were 10 years ago. The wireless-way-of-life arrived and with it illness. First came mobiles and telephone masts, then wifi for computers, doorbells and baby alarms, to name but a few.

Diagnostic tests such as cerebral blood profusion scans, heart rate variability and molecular markers show that ES is the body’s physical reaction to EM exposure.

Now Britain is on the cusp of a new wave of electromagnetic pollution, the pulsating “smart” meters wireless revolution. It is to be delivered by our utility services such as gas, electricity and water at an estimated cost of, wait for it, of £11 billion pounds. Just think – half the estimated cost of renewing Trident will be added to our utility bills while the unknown cost to NHS for biological damage to the nation’s health is impossible to estimate.

It sounds bizarre, yet it is true that none of this burgeoning technology or its consequential energy fields were ever tested on humans before they were introduced. To make matters worse the UK government refuses to take into account the recent revolution in biological understanding, which now informs leading scientists in the field, that humans are indeed being seriously damaged by low level non-thermal radiation such as wifi.

Ask the UK government about this threat to our health and you will receive a quote saying it follows the ICNIRP’s safety guidelines. But a closer look reveals that any knowledgeable expert in the biological field knows that this safety limit, which only detects whether a body is being burnt by this radiation, is totally outdated by our new biological understanding of how our bodies work.

Biologists are now only too aware that we humans are brilliantly balanced electrochemical beings. Our every cell wall can be damaged by low level radiation breaking down its membranes and leaking calcium into our cells, causing havoc. Every organ in our body operates through exact finely targeted electrical impulses or messengers, which can be distorted and interfered by low level electromagnetic fields passing straight through walls and buildings into our bodies.

ES-UK offers sufferers practical advice and education and fights the up-hill battle to inform the public, politicians and relevant bodies about the biological dangers of EM radiation. This growing charity operates in the face of millions of pounds being spent by the enormous telecommunications industry as it attempts to override what it considers any negative scientific findings.

Fortunately groups like ES-UK are finally beginning to turn things around. Current scientific consensus accepts that long-term low-level EM exposure is harmful and that some people are more sensitive to it than others.

The World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer now classifies powerlines and radio frequency radiation as class 2B possible cancer agents. Further, a growing body of scientists now say they should be classed as a 2A probable, or even class 1 certain.

The UK safety limit is also considered obsolete by other countries and the European Parliament has asked all member states to follow the precautionary principle and reduce their citizens’ exposure to EMFs. In response most countries in Europe have a more up-to-date safety level than the UK. The UK government has ignored this advice and gone on full speed to promote our wireless-world.

In Sweden ES is treated as a functional disability and sufferers can get grants to shield their homes from EM radiation. There are mobile phone-free zones in Stockholm and Salzburg public transport systems. Other countries such as Australia, France, Germany and Spain have recognised individual ES cases through disability awards, while Canada and Russia have medical centres specialising in ES. France has gone so far as to legislate to take Wifi out of nursery schools and for wifi to be turned off when not in use in other schools.

Why does our government continually follow its outdated approach to public health? We watched for decades as experts warned about the harm from lead in petrol, more decades as they warned about asbestos and mad cows disease before safety measure were taken to protect the public. ES-UK and many others wonder if industry lobbying, along with the government’s windfall of capital from leasing wavelengths, means that ministers turn a blind eye to what they don’t want to know.

Somerset GP and ES-UK trustee, Dr Andrew Tresidder is convinced ES is under-recognised as GPs just do not know about this illness. He explains “A number of my patients have symptoms and illnesses that have been caused by exposure to electromagnetic fields, and which have been relieved by avoidance of the same fields.”

ES is usually a progressive condition and over time the sufferer may become sensitive to more devices and frequencies and their reactions may increase in severity.

Meanwhile, new research by the ES-UK has found that a third (33%) of Brits sleep with their mobile phone (which constantly sends out waves of radiation to stay in contact with the closest phone mast) near their bed and 33% also use their smart phone as an alarm clock without turning it to airplane mode.

Possibly the last word should go to Lynn Attwood who says that despite taking note of her body’s early warning system and avoiding exposure she still sometimes gets tricked into thinking somewhere is safe when it is not. She gets blasted and knocked out again from this electromagnetic poison.

No one, even the telecommunications industry or the UK government, will deny that the amount of electromagnetic pollution we are all living amongst is exponentially increasing every single day – far beyond a level any humans have ever experienced.

With that thought in mind Lynn warns,

“I’m just one of the canaries in the coal mine. The cumulative effect is coming your way soon.”

Toni Turner

Toni Turner is a London based journalist who has written for nationals, including The Sunday Times, The Independent and The Guardian. She has edited a range of health journals and taught health journalism at City University, London.